In recent years, ad exchanges are becoming increasingly prevalent for facilitating the sale and purchase of online advertising. Often, the sale and purchase of online advertising is conducted through real-time bidding (RTB). Using RTB, advertising inventory is bought and sold on a per-impression basis, via programmatic instantaneous auction. An ad impression is a placement of an advertisement on a piece of web content, such as a webpage. Each time an ad is fetched on a loading of a piece of web content is counted as an ad impression.
When a publisher receives a request to load web content including an ad space, the publisher transmits an ad request for the ad impression to an ad exchange. The ad exchange transmits the ad request to advertisers. An advertiser may bid on the ad impression, and if the bid is won, the advertiser's advertisement is displayed with the web content. In some cases, a Demand Side Platform (DSP), a Supply Side Platform (SSP), an ad network, and/or other entities may also be involved in real-time transactions for the sale of ad impressions.
Various types of ad fraud may be committed in the various stages of real-time transactions for the sale of ad impressions. Fraud may lead to a distrust of ad exchanges as well as other entities involved in real-time transactions for the sale of ad impressions.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.